do not use <div> for hidden preheader. This can add some blank space in some clients (yahoo).

for hidden preheader

Dynamic Sender Profile You can use personalization in your Sender Profile. You can’t use AMPscript that is set in your email template because the Sender Profile is read before the email template. You can use a content area, as that … Continue reading →

In trying to find info on image file size best practices, I found a few things. ExactTarget will not host an image file over 200KB. That’s not an issue for us as we use a CDN, but something to keep … Continue reading →

Pulling data from a data extension: Pulling data from a data extension outside of the recipient list DE. Let’s say I have a DE that is my list of email recipeints and there is another DE with a list of … Continue reading →

FTP data file into “import” folder In ET, go to “Interactions / Import” and click “Create” Name: Your choice File Naming Pattern: This is the name of the file you uploaded using FTP. Make sure to include file extension (.csv). … Continue reading →

So we have some personalization in an email where we want to greet the recipient using their first name. In the example the first name was a pet name and the email was alerting the recipient that it was time … Continue reading →

I did a quick test to see how many characters show in a subject line. With desktop apps and web-based email clients, it’s not too big of a deal, and the old standard of a 50 character max seems to … Continue reading →

You ever see those buttons in Google email subject lines? I see them mostly on Amazon.com orders where there is a tracking button right in the subject line. Here’s how it’s done, or at least a way to test it. … Continue reading →

Outlook 2007, and possible other email clients, do allow padding styles to be applied to a table cell (TD), but if you add padding one cell in a multi-cell row, the padding will affect all the cells in that row. … Continue reading →

I have not personally been able to make this work, but I’ve only tried on one client email, so I’m keeping this code handy for the future. The text below is taken directly from freshinbox.com. I’m not trying to pretend it’s … Continue reading →

For people who are on PCs using Outlook, that icon with the two beer glasses does not render, but many other icons do. I don’t have a complete list of which ones do and which ones don’t, but I’ve tried … Continue reading →

What ExactTarget calls “Content syndication” is merely external content pulled into the email. It’s like includes PHP or a “Content Scrape” in Silverpop. It’s pretty simple, except when it comes to dynamic content in the link itself, or in the … Continue reading →

I did I very small amount of testing, but I was specifically trying to changed the default visited link color in Outlook 2007. The default color is the awefull purple that used to be all over the place on web … Continue reading →

I have a client who has two brands that have a different style guide for each, and one says “e-mail” and the other says “email”. So, I set up a ruleset to check a field that tells me which brand, … Continue reading →

Line height (line-height) issue in Outlook 2010 Add mso-line-height-rule:exactly just before your line-height declaration. < td style=“mso-line-height-rule:exactly; line-height:50px;> This fix ONLY works on block elements. So trying to achieve the same effect inside a font or span tag will not … Continue reading →

Weird border showing up around TD on mobile devices. It was either a border or a 1px space showing up around table cells. It was only mobile devices. I was seeing it on iPads and my Android phone. The … Continue reading →

Here’s the scenario. We had links where the URL was populated from the data. The field was called “URL”, and it contained URLs without the http://. So, my code looked like this: <a href=”http://%%URL%%”>%%URL%%</a> Pretty straight forward. Well, the data … Continue reading →

Posted inEmail Dev|Comments Off on Another great Litmus article: Using HTML5 and CSS3 in Email

For responsive, progressive, expansive, explosive emails, you sometimes have mobile only content that you want to hide for desktop email clients. For most reasonable email clients, you can add some inline styles to hide the content. width:0;display:none;visibility:hidden, etc. etc. This … Continue reading →

I had a multi cell table row with 3×3 images. I needed the row height to only be 3 pixels tall, but in Outlook 2013 the TD heights would blow up to 12 pixels (approx). I tried multiple things. I … Continue reading →

When hiding mobile only content from desktop email clients, you need to use a rediculous list of styles to account for many of the email clients shotty CSS support. border:0;width:0;overflow:hidden;float:left;display:none;max-height:0px;visibility:hidden; Not only that, you should wrap the content in IE … Continue reading →

Posted inEmail Dev|Comments Off on Mobile email development – hide TR as well as TD when hiding mobile content for desktop

The claim is, “Email anywhere. On any device.”. So I downloaded their basic template and ran a test through Litmus. The results were really good for the most part, but did not quite live up to their claim. Outlook 07, … Continue reading →

The Android Gmail App does some really funky things with HTML email layouts. It looks like it tries to fit the layout to the viewport, like iOS does, but it’s breaks stuff along the way. Using the old-school 1×1 spacer … Continue reading →

Here’s the scenario. You send out an email using a data extention. The email template has dynamic content. Specifically, the template has a link that is populated from the DE. If that DE is updated, and the email is sent … Continue reading →

This took can be very helpful when trying to figure out why your emails campaigns are having a low deliverability rate. About the SuperTool! All of your MX record, DNS, blacklist and SMTP diagnostics in one integrated tool. Input a domain … Continue reading →

8 Ways to Help Avoid Postini Filtering By Tonya Mitchell Sr. Deliverability Consultant at Return Path Your subscriber has a lot of control. Per the Google Apps transition FAQs, Gmail spam filtering “responds to input from the user about what is … Continue reading →

The ask was that the email needed to show tabular data from fields only if the fields were not empty, and they wanted to have an odd/even table row color scheme for readability. If this were JavaScript I would have … Continue reading →

From my tests and info I found, Outlook 07 does not support animated GIFs. It will show only one frame. Pretty much all other popular email clients do show the animated GIF in all its glory.

In some instances, in some some email clients, using <sup> will really mess with the line height. I’ve had luck adding font-size:8px, or whatever size works, to keep the font size of the <sup> small and not disrupt the line … Continue reading →

Why Most Emails are LameEmail has remained pretty boring and unchanged since the late ‘90s, using tables instead of divs, and inline style instead of CSS. Just because it’s stuck in the past like Al Bundy, doesn’t mean you can’t … Continue reading →

I’m not quite sure what to think about this. I read this article while doing some research on this subject. I read this article right after reading four other articles that subscribed to the so-called myths that Tim Watson points … Continue reading →

According to this site, “Over 35% of SPAM is detected from an email’s Subject Line.” Here’s a handy subject line spam tests. http://www.localnews.biz/subjectline/validatesubjectline.asp Here’s another site with a similar tool. http://www.subjectline.com/

This fix is to add font-size:0;line-height:0 Thanks to Philip Storey. http://blog.lyris.com/us/microsoft-outlook-2013-what-email-marketers-need-to-know/

My experience using ExactTarget has been with mostly with using HTML-base (paste) emails. Not using their templates, so for my purposes, I went to the page below and went to the section, “How to Insert a Facebook Like Button into … Continue reading →